Broken Family
by Simple Enigma
Summary: one shot, post serenity, SPOILERS FOR BIG DAMN MOVIE! life after the movie for the crew of serenity. please review.


THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING please do not read if you havnt seen the big damn movie!

* * *

Kaylee, Jayne and Mal sat around the table in the mess, Mal was carefully cutting an apple and thoughtfully eating the pieces, Kaylee was staring absently at hers and Jayne was slouched back in his chair staring across the table at the gaping empty space where people had once sat. Why was it that it made him feel so cold? He had never much cared for the little man, the preacher, well he was ok. But for some reason he didn't feel safe thinking that it was possible for death to steal into a place like the kitchen and leave an empty cold space where a warm body had been. There were only two options, work out, shoot somthin, or move one of the chairs away. Since there was no one around to shoot, and Jayne didn't particularly feel like working out in the cargo bay where he knew Zoë would be reminiscing, he opted for the later.

"Jayne, what are you doing?" Mal asked, looking up from the apple and cocking an eyebrow at him. Jayne looked back innocently from where he stood with the chair half raised.

"There's fewer of us now, seems stupid to keep extra chairs out like that, takes up room."

"No!" Kaylee came out of her revere, startled, "leave it."

"Its stupid I said, feels too . . ." he groped for the word he had been thinking of, "empty."

"We can't just start erasing them, getting rid of their chairs like that, like they never was here." Kaylee looked to Mal for support.

"We're all feeling it Jayne, getting rid of chairs aint gonna help us none."

"It'll help me."

"Well that's all that matters aint it!" Mal snapped and Jayne shrugged back.

"Seems like it to me." He went back to lugging the chair about.

"So your just going to erase them ever being here, calling her home! You might as well get rid of the pilots chair, leave Zoë on the next planet, get rid of every scrap of evidence they ever came on this boat!"

"Kaylee . . ." Mal started, putting down the apple.

"No, do whatever you want."

The ship lurched slightly and Jayne stumbled, Mal rolled his eyes in frustration and stood up abruptly exclaiming,

"Goramit, who's flying this thing?"

There was a moments pause when everyone in the room grew slightly pale.

_oh ya, that would be me _

And then Kaylee Laughed.

* * *

Simon and River sat quietly in Rivers bedroom. She was curled up at the head of the bed and Simon sat at the foot, staring at her levelly, quietly, thoughtfully. Millions of things ran through his head while he looked at her, so different. So much the same. She was no longer completely unintelligible, she was so different from even a month a go, she had killed. Simon shuddered at the thought of all the things his baby sister was capable of.

Then there were the deaths in the family. For that is what he had come to see the crew of Serenity as. More a family than his own, who had left him, left River to the hands of the government and their damn academy. Mal was more a father than any he had known, Zoë, if anyone, a mother, Jayne the bully brother, and Wash? What had wash been? A brother to them both, never anything other than kind. The preacher? Had he been a grandfather to them? Is that what they were like?

Simon had never lost a family member before, sure, his father had practically disowned him, and River, oh River had caused her share of anxiety, but he had never lost anyone forever. At least he was quite sure his parents were warm and comfortable safe in their home. What would it be like now to go to into the cockpit and have no one there? Perhaps mal, sitting around, watching the dials, deftly reading the screens and pretending to understand exactly what it all meant. And Zoë, what would it be like to see her alone, her hand clenched around invisible fingers, her eyes closed with the image of something no longer tangible.

"I miss them too." River whispered, staring at Simon from over her knees. "But there are only so many possible endings to a candle, it can be blown out softly, snuffed out violently, or burn and burn until it melts away. No wick is ever ending; all must burn to their ends. Some candles are shorter, less wax to burn, less wick to heat up and spark. Book was hot burning, consuming wax and wick and turning fast into a puddle, and Wash -he played dinosaurs with me- too tall a candle, didn't burn fast enough for the world. Couldn't keep up."

"I wish I could see it River, the reason behind it all. It seems so senseless."

"Reason." River laughed, "There's never any reason. Ask Zoë, no reason. Only consequence and . . . and tears."

"Tears?" Simon wondered, had he seen River cry? She nodded.

"Yours, hers, Kaylees, Mals, even Jayne did not smile. And I slept on a wet pillow too damp to support my head or keep me floating. But all candles burn out Simon, it's just a matter of time."

* * *

Kaylee was in the cockpit. She hadn't been there since it happened and she still found it all hard to believe. The pilots chair had a hole in back, an empty gaping hole that Kaylee tried hard not to think of as the exit wound. She couldn't help if she remembered. A face so warm, so cold.

And the blood.

Laughing and joking cut short

And it was hard not to feel awkward when Zoë was around.

So much loss and suffering.

To think that the one place he could almost always be found, the place he did his job every day, the chair he had sat in and played with the silly dinosaurs. Kaylee picked one up, no one had moved them , they would probably always be there. She touched it with a new appreciation and smiled to herself.

_Everything looks good from here...Yes. Yes, this is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... "This Land." I think we should call it "your grave!" Ah, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! Ha ha HA! Mine is an evil laugh! Now die! Oh, no, God! Oh, dear God in heaven!_

The one place he felt safe. Turned itself into his own personal death trap. Kaylee shuddered. She would never feel safe in the engine room again.

* * *

She looked broken.

Not disheveled, not wild, her hair was neat and pulled back loosely from her face, eye shadow meticulously applied, clothes matching and clean. It was in her eyes you could see the change. Like a horse when properly broken, no longer belongs with the herd or the wild passion of nature, Zoë no longer belonged with the ship. The laughing family they had pieced together with the miss matched crew. There was a part of her no longer there, physically embodied by the empty chair at the table in the mess, the empty seat at the front of the ship, the empty space next to her in her bed, the empty closet in the corner of the room.

She was a widow.

Mal Carefully sat down beside her on the rusty stairs leading into the cargo bay, Zoë sat there alone often, staring into the different areas of the room where memories lurked hauntingly. She looked up and smiled softly at him as he appeared and made room for him beside her on the stair.

"What you thinking on?" He asked innocently and Zoë sighed.

"Same thing I've been thinking on for awhile now."

"Seems like forever."

"No," she whispered into the room, past mal as though he was no longer there, or had never been, "Seems like only moments . . ."

Mal shifted uncomfortably, he looked out over the empty bay, trying to see what Zoë saw. He remembered, oh yes, he remembered. Countless times Wash had stood either here, or over there. Saved his life on that spot, tackled him for a ball near the hoop, and cracked a joke . . . nearly everywhere he had stood.

"We couldn't have done anything." Mal whispered into one particular corner he thought held a spectral image. He straightened his back, feeling the heavy anvil of guilt shift on his shoulders, trying to find a more comfortable spot where it didn't dig in quite as much.

"Oh I know," Zoë answered, "Doesn't mean I wont carry that moment with me wherever I go. Constantly going over every angle of it, trying to see if I had done that, or seen this, could I have saved him." There was a moment of silence broken by a soft laugh, mal startled, shuddering, he could hear the tears in the sound, and it reminded him too much of the sound she had made in that one instant.

"Like a leaf on the wind." she whispered, "we were going to have babies."

_Watch me soar_

"What?" mal didn't know quite what to say to that, sure Wash and Zoë had been married for almost two years, but they had never mentioned children before.

"Wash and I talked it out, decided when this was over we were gonna populate this boat with littl'ns"

_and I want every one of them to look like you baby _

"Just like wash not to ask me before committing to a new crew member." mal grumbled and glanced over at Zoë, but she was no longer smiling. She stared out before her with no expression to speak of and mal could practically picture Wash standing in front of her with his obnoxious Hawaiian T shirt thrown over his flight suit, his light red hair mussed up and spiked, his hands on his hips, crookedly grinning down at his wife.

_I'll be right behind you _

"What happens," Zoë asked quietly, "When I cant do this anymore?"

"What?"

"Make a picture in my head. See his face and hear his voice. What happens when the memories fade? How will I keep going if I can't hear him call me baby, feel his lips or see his smile? I gave him everything I had and he left me with no piece of him, and only half of what I had before."

"I'm sorry Zoë" Mal had come to talk to her, to comfort her, so why was he choking up? "I'm sorry."

"Mal, If it weren't for you I wouldn't know him. You have nothing to sorry me about. It just kills me that I have no one to pass him on to, no way of keeping him alive, when I die, who knows when, he's going with me. Who else is there to remember him?"

Mal felt like everything, she said ended in a question, and who was he to answer.

"We can Zoë, all of us. Me, Simon, Kaylee, even Jayne, all of us. We keep him alive every day by leavin the gorram dinosaurs on the dash, by laughin about things he said, talking about how much we miss him. You're not the only one on this boat who lost something in all this, and I know you don't pretend to be, but this here is my crew, and I'll keep us together if I can."

Zoë looked away from the image of her husband she had conjured and her eyes met Mals, docile and quiet eyes. She would never be the same. She might go on missions, shoot and maim like the good old days, but she was no longer the Zoë Mal knew. She was lonely and hurt, like a child in places where she had been hard before.

"How do you say goodbye Mal? To all of it?"

Another question. well then, it was lucky mal knew the answer. He straightened his back a little more and shifted that anvil.

"You don't. You never have to."

* * *

- For my baby, Wash, im gonna miss you - 


End file.
